The Naked Detective(65)

———

The tools did not quite fit in the trunk of Ozzie's cab. No matter how he laid them in, the handles stuck out past the fender. Finally he found a piece of fraying twine and tied the trunk lid down. I rolled up the borrowed shirts and held them on my lap.

As we drove away from Elgin Lane, I asked him if we could drop the gear off at my house before returning to the park so I could get my bike. He surprised me then.

He said, "I'll bring you down to where you get the launch. What time you wanna go?"

I said, "You don't need to do that, Oz."

"No problem. I wanna do it."

"How come?"

"How come?" He gave the steering wheel a little slap. He didn't look at me. He said, "You don't think I pay attention, do you? You don't think I notice things. How come? Because this is a big deal to you. That's how come."

That put me at a loss. I swallowed. I said, "We'll be picking up another person."

"The woman you hide in the backyard?" said Oz. "The one who makes your little thing stand up?"

What could you do with a guy like this? I just looked at him and gave a cockeyed nod.

"Very nice. Just say what time you want to be picked up."

"Let's make it three." I thought about bed, how much I longed to be racked out, curled up beneath a steamy sheet. "No, let's make it four."

"Whatever."

He brought me back to Bayview. I said, "Thanks, Oz. Thanks a lot."

He got shy and waved it off.

I said, "Soon we're back to tennis. Really soon."

"I'll kick your ass," he said.





33


I locked my bike to the palm I always lock it to, and trudged up the three porch stairs.

It was around ten o'clock by now. Ten, in late April, is just about the time that the freshness of the morning has been all used up, and it starts feeling very hot, and somehow parched in spite of the humidity. The plants have given up the little dribs and veins of moisture they'd hoarded through the night; their leaves begin to curl. Shadows shrink inward like evaporating puddles; collected sun throbs upward from the pavements. I was glad to be going inside.

I opened my front door. A wedge of sunlight slipped in with me, and in its yellow glare I saw a piece of paper on the floor. The paper was around four inches square—a torn-off sheet from a desk pad of some sort. I bent to lift it up. It had three words printed on it. The words were Stop Right Now.

I read them with an odd dispassion. They reminded me of my fear but did not increase it. I found this strange. Fear had invaded my life only a day or two before, yet already it had become a given, like a chronic ache or a background hum of pipes. With a numbness that stood as a fair approximation of real calm, I read the threatening note again.

Then I thought of something. I tracked down the matchbook that I'd found in Kenny Lukens' duffel and compared its writing with the note. It was hard to tell if they came from the same hand. Two different pens, two different thicknesses of paper. The matchbook had only numbers, and the person who scrawled on it had been drunk; the note had only letters, and was stone sober in its terseness. Still, there were definite resemblances: a certain impatient leaning of the characters, a jumpy tendency to lift the pen where other people might have made a curve.

I concluded that the samples matched, then was unsure what, if anything, I'd proved. If nothing else, I became persuaded that the person I was most annoying was the right person to annoy. I wasn't sure I found this comforting.

I went upstairs and had a shower. I didn't want the water to be hot; I didn't want it cold. I wanted it the same temperature as my skin so that it would lull me with the deliciousness of feeling like nothing at all.

I fell into bed with my hair still soaking wet, and slept until midafternoon.

———

I woke up nervous, suspecting that my earlier calm had in fact been nothing but exhaustion, a brief depletion of adrenaline.

I went downstairs and put on a pot of coffee. While it was brewing, I jumped into the pool. It was slightly creepy, wading where the rats had floated; I couldn't yet bring myself to put my face in. Still, the pool was all in all a pleasure. I twirled in it, bent my knees so I was submerged up to the chin. Sunlight twinkled as I looked around my little yard. At the hot tub, the thatch palm, the table where I'd opened Maggie's robe.

Bobbing, slowly turning, I suddenly felt a wistful, almost maudlin affection for my life, as if that life were a thing unto itself, a thing outside of me. It seemed insignificant and precious; it required no grandeur or meaning to give it worth; its value had to do with nothing large. The idea broke through to me, less with fear than sorrow now, that I might die before this thing was finished. But I would try to finish anyway. I no longer had any doubt of it. I would try my best to see it through, and I would find out if Maggie's notion made any sense at all—if finishing would somehow back- flow into me and teach me how to finish, or if this would prove to be just some isolated episode, a detour leading nowhere.